“Refugee. I hate that word.”
Jules was 19 and already part of the elite special forces of the March 23 Movement, also known as M23. He looked me straight in the eye and inhaled deeply on a cigarette. His face still held the soft lines of a teenager, but his story carried the weight of someone who had lived far too much, far too young. Our conversation took place in early February, on the banks of Lake Kivu in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, in the far east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At 14, he watched as his grandfather was executed and his village razed. With his family and community destroyed, he made a decision to join a local militia.
Jules’ family was Banyamulenge, a Tutsi minority long settled in the highlands of North and South Kivu, whose members are treated across much of Congo as outsiders. That label alone had marked the family for death. For Jules, picking up a weapon wasn’t rebellion. It was survival.
Lake Kivu stretched out flat and still, indifferent to the decades of blood spilled along its volcanic shore. On the far side lay Rwanda, whose influence looms large over this corner of Congo. It had been a week since M23 seized the city. Goma, unexpectedly, felt calm. But just four hours south, in Bukavu, the group was on the verge of capturing its second provincial capital.
M23 is a Tutsi-led rebel group that reemerged in late 2021, after years of dormancy. Based in the Virunga Mountains along the border between Rwanda and Congo, its fighters swept across North Kivu, capturing towns and territory. Their resurgence revived one of Central Africa’s longest-running conflicts, rooted in the fallout of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the regional instability that followed.
The fall of Goma marked the climax of a year-long M23 campaign that slowly encircled the city. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the week-long battle.
“The violence has severely impacted civilians,” wrote Duniya Aslam Khan, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in an email to New Lines. As examples, Khan cited “displacement sites attacked, infrastructure destroyed and people fleeing without shelter, food or essential services.”
Jules flicked his cigarette into the dirt and exhaled. “They call us invaders, but we were born here. My father was born here, my grandfather too.” He let the words hang in the air. “And yet, they say we don’t belong.”
When M23 swept through Goma and Bukavu, it brought renewed international attention to a conflict in eastern Congo that was never truly resolved.
I didn’t go to eastern Congo to chase headlines. I went because I had questions — about where I came from, about the region that shaped my own family’s past. To some, M23 was an illegal rebellion orchestrated by Rwanda. To others, it was a liberation force fighting to restore dignity and security to a part of Africa scarred by 30 years of conflict, displacement and impunity — a place where violence wasn’t episodic, but generational.
What I found was a place where identity — including my own — shaped every perception of the war and where truth shifted with every step.
After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which nearly 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, an estimated 2 million Hutus — including many perpetrators of those killings — fled to eastern Congo. Rwanda’s new Tutsi-led government, under Paul Kagame, crossed the border to dismantle the refugee camps where the former regime was regrouping. That incursion sparked two regional wars. The fighting hasn’t stopped since.
In the aftermath, Congolese Tutsis — particularly the Banyamulenge, long rooted in Congo but often perceived as foreigners by other communities and the state — were systematically marginalized. Despite generations of citizenship, their Tutsi identity and perceived ties to Rwanda led many to view them with suspicion.
Armed groups like the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) — founded by remnants of the Hutu militias responsible for the genocide — have repeatedly targeted Banyamulenge communities. More recently, factions within the Wazalendo, a loose coalition of so-called “patriotic” self-defense groups, have also attacked Banyamulenge villages, accusing them of working with Rwanda or M23. Many Banyamulenge have faced the reality of surviving massacres and growing up in a country that treats them as outsiders.
M23 grew from the pressure. Its leaders accuse the Congolese state of fighting alongside and protecting groups like the FDLR while also turning a blind eye to attacks on Congolese Tutsis. They frame themselves as fighting to defend Tutsi civilians, assert their place within Congo’s political future and reform a corrupt state that has abandoned eastern Congo. Despite their demands, the Congolese government has long refused to recognize M23 as a legitimate political actor, portraying it instead as a proxy force backed by Rwanda. “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” President Felix Tshisekedi said in January 2025, during a speech to the diplomatic corps in Kinshasa. That mutual distrust has kept both sides locked in a cycle of accusation and violence, even as the limited peace talks that began two weeks ago continue, alongside a fragile agreement to halt the fighting.
To understand why the return of M23 is so terrifying and familiar to many in Congo, it is important to look back at the last time it seized control. In 2012, the group — formed by former fighters from the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) — seized Goma in less than 24 hours. They said the Congolese government had failed to uphold a 2009 peace deal that promised their integration into the army and political system. Naming themselves the March 23 Movement after the date of that agreement, M23 was born out of broken promises.
For 10 days in 2012, Goma, a city of 2 million, was under rebel control. M23 eventually withdrew under regional pressure and a new agreement was hastily signed in December 2013, brokered by the U.N. and neighboring states. The group was meant to disarm and be reintegrated into the national army. Once again, the promises unraveled. M23 retreated to the mountains and waited.
M23 reemerged in late 2021, mounting a steady campaign to reclaim territory across North Kivu. Despite encircling Goma for nearly a year, they refrained from taking the city immediately, possibly to avoid the kind of international backlash that followed their 2012 occupation. But in January 2025, they moved. Goma fell once again. Weeks later, they captured Bukavu, a city they had never taken before. The message was clear: This time, they weren’t just demonstrating power. They were asserting control.
Today, President Tshisekedi makes no secret of who he believes is behind their return: “There is no doubt Rwanda has supported the M23 to come and attack the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Rwanda denies this, though its own President Kagame, when pressed in a CNN interview, said: “Is there a problem in Congo that concerns Rwanda? And would Rwanda do anything to protect itself? I’d say 100%.”
To Rwanda, eastern Congo still harbors a threat. Groups like the FDLR remain active in the region. Kigali has long argued that the Congolese state is unwilling or unable to neutralize them. Caught between those narratives are Congolese Tutsis like Jules — viewed by Kinshasa as suspect, by Rwanda as kin and by local militias as enemies. For them, war is not a foreign policy issue. It’s personal.
I was born to an Irish-Australian father and a Rwandan mother, who left when I was 6. There was no Rwandan culture in my upbringing: no language, no stories, no lineage I could trace. I filled the absence by reading obsessively about the region and, by extension, its wars. The genocide, the foreign interventions, the slow unraveling of eastern Congo — the more I read, the harder it was to pin down Rwanda’s role in the violence unfolding just beyond its western border.
Trying to make sense of the history I’d grown up reading about, I eventually began traveling to Rwanda. But conversations about Congo were shut down quickly, avoided in public and deflected in private.
Only once, in a friend’s apartment, did someone speak plainly. “Of course, Rwanda is in Congo,” she said. “We have to defend ourselves.” I kept turning that sentence over in my head. The more I read, the more I traveled, and the more people I spoke to, the deeper the contradictions became. Each narrative had its own logic and its own wounds. Truth shifted depending on who was speaking, and from where.
It was late January in Japan. I had been in Tokyo for weeks due to a writing course. Half-drunk after a night out, I checked my phone. “M23 takes Goma.” Thirty-seven hours later, I landed in Kigali. In Kicukiro, a lively district in the city’s southeast and the place where my mother was born, music and people poured from bars. In private, everyone was whispering about M23’s return.
“You won’t make it,” a friend said over a game of pool and Amstel beer. “Even if you reach Gisenyi, the moment you cross, you’ll disappear.” He leaned in. “The Congolese army is killing anyone who looks Tutsi. I’m from Congo. I’m Tutsi. I wouldn’t go near that border.”
In Kigali, the picture started to sharpen. This wasn’t the same M23 that took Goma in 2012. Since late 2021, they have reemerged, better armed and more politically organized. Now, they weren’t acting alone. M23 had joined the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), a coalition led by the exiled Congolese official Corneille Nangaa. Once close to Tshisekedi, Nangaa had since broken with Kinshasa and framed the alliance as a reformist coalition promising to rebuild Congo’s fractured institutions and protect ethnic minorities.
Just before I left Kigali for Gisenyi, I called Bertrand Bisimwa, the president of M23, after obtaining his number through contacts in Rwanda. I had reached out seeking advice on how to cross into Congo and to vouch for myself as a journalist. Our conversation flowed mostly in English, occasionally slipping into French when words ran short. He spoke carefully, listening politely as I explained my reporting plans. Since then, we have stayed in touch. Responding to questions via text message, Bisimwa wrote, “We promote a new governance that protects all citizens and creates a national identity stronger than ethnicity or tribe.”
While M23 spoke the language of reform, the Congolese army faced serious credibility issues of its own. “We’ve documented widespread abuses — extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary detention and looting — committed not only by government troops but also by allied militias around Goma in 2024,” Clementine de Montjoye, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in an interview with New Lines. Notably, Human Rights Watch has also reported that M23 rebels have committed war crimes, unlawful killings and rapes in eastern Congo. In one of the most serious incidents, M23 fighters summarily executed at least 22 civilians in the village of Kishishe in November 2022, following clashes with rival militias.
By April 2025, M23 controlled territory roughly the size of Lebanon. Rutshuru, Goma, Bukavu and Walikale, a strategic town with some of Congo’s richest gold reserves, had fallen under their control. The Congolese army had disintegrated. Seventeen peacekeepers from the Southern African Development Community had already been killed trying to hold the line. In late April, following negotiations mediated by Qatar, M23 and the Congolese government agreed to a ceasefire. It was the first major breakthrough since the escalation in fighting in 2025, although tensions on the ground remained high.
This was not, by any account, an underfunded bush war. “We’ve seen an increase in use of modern weaponry in the conflict,” de Montjoye said. But firepower doesn’t equal legitimacy. Even as Kinshasa’s forces collapsed, many viewed M23’s campaign not as a liberation effort, but as a Rwandan-backed incursion — the latest chapter in a long-running strategy of regional destabilization.
Gisenyi, a sleepy lake town on Rwanda’s border with Congo, felt slower than Kigali. A week earlier, the Congolese army had shelled it from Goma’s airport, killing 15 civilians. The wounds were still visible. The man on the night watch at my guesthouse had a scar running from his cheek to his neck — shrapnel from that day.
Finding information on how to cross the border was difficult. My first attempt — just walking up to the Grand Barriere border crossing — got me laughed away. After that, I reached out to local journalists and fixers, but no one could agree on the process. Everyone had a different version. One quoted me $1,000 for a “visa.”
That night, I met a Congolese journalist at a bar who said he’d try to cross with me the next morning. This time, I was led up three flights of stairs to a cramped, overheated office above the main stamping floor. Aid workers, reporters and civilians crowded the hallway, waiting their turn to get approval to cross the border. When I finally reached the desk, the official barely looked up.
“You can’t cross,” he said. “You need permission from Lawrence Kanyuka.” That name hit me like a jolt. Kanyuka was the spokesperson for M23 and the public face of the group’s political messaging. I’d already been given his number by a fixer. I nodded and returned to the guesthouse in Rwanda. Two days later, my phone lit up.
“Go to the border now,” Kanyuka said.
The rain hadn’t stopped in hours. I flagged down a moto taxi and ended up at Petit Barriere, the smaller, more chaotic crossing. Gisenyi and Goma sit directly across the border from each other, essentially functioning as two halves of the same urban area. The shift was immediate. Gisenyi ended in asphalt, Goma started in mud. Then I noticed the mistake. The Congolese border officials had given me an exit stamp, not entry. I’d crossed illegally without realizing it.
A short, fat man in a striped polo stood watching me. “Passport.”
I handed it over. “They gave me the wrong stamp,” I said. “This is exit, not entry.”
“In my office. Now,” said the official. The room was small, damp and windowless. “You entered illegally. Where is your entry stamp?”
“Just next door, they made a mistake. I’ve only just arrived.”
He stared at me. “Lies. You are a mercenary trying to cross back into Rwanda.”
“I have permission from Kanyuka,” I said. I pulled out my phone and dialed. No answer. I kept my eyes on the screen, willing it to ring. When it finally did, I handed it to him without a word.
He gave it back and nodded. “Kanyuka is my boss. Welcome, my friend. We’ve
been expecting you.”
Goma didn’t just feel more alive than Gisenyi — it felt sharper, louder, like the volume had been turned up on everything.
At the border official’s insistence, I was handed over to a moto taxi. I told the driver where I’d booked. He shook his head. “We have accommodation for you.”
We weaved through traffic — lorries, minibuses and a blur of other moto taxis. There were no road rules, only instinct.
The war was visible. Bullet holes marked the walls of buildings. We passed the Chukudu roundabout, where a towering wooden sculpture honored the traditional scooters still used across Central Africa. Then the city shifted. Villas appeared behind iron gates, with glimpses of Lake Kivu between them.
We arrived at Linda Hotel. Along with Serena next door, it had become one of M23’s unofficial bases in Goma. Their leaders stayed here. I was being kept close — watched.
“Ah, Luke — welcome, have a seat.” Yves, a Burundian journalist I’d spoken to days earlier, was already at the bar with a half-empty bottle of Bacardi. I ordered a beer and joined him.
Minutes later, Lawrence Kanyuka walked in. He had grown up in England after fleeing Congo and claiming asylum. Now, he was one of the most powerful men in North Kivu. He was tall and broad, with the build of a rugby player and a pistol tucked beneath his shirt. Yves nodded toward the weapon. Kanyuka placed it on the table like it was nothing more than a phone, then sat down.
Then came the others. One by one, M23 officials arrived, each laying a weapon down beside their drink. The table was filled with bottles. By then, I was one of the few Western journalists in the city. The line between source and subject had dissolved. I was drinking with the architects of the war.
Eastern Congo is often described as forgotten, but that feels too passive. It is not forgotten. It has been abandoned, ignored and exploited. Over the past 30 years, an estimated 6 million people have died from violence, hunger and disease. Whole towns have been erased, generations scattered.
In 2023 alone, more than 5 million people were internally displaced, most of them in the east. Some families are on their third, fourth or even fifth displacement. Refugee camps swell and empty like lungs.
We packed 11 people into a Toyota Land Cruiser that had once belonged to the Congolese government. M23 was advancing on both fronts, military and administrative. State vehicles were part of the spoils. Kanyuka drove, flanked by two special forces soldiers. The rest of us crammed in behind: political aides, a camera crew, two more fighters and Roxy the dog, our supposed good luck charm.
As we moved through Goma, the streets pressed in. Traffic locked around us on all sides. Ahead, a crowd had spilled onto the road, swelling into every lane. It was unclear at first whether it was a protest or something else.
Kanyuka ordered the two soldiers out. They pushed into the crowd. Slowly, it began to part.
A man had been stripped naked, a tire placed around his neck and set on fire. He had been accused of theft. With no functioning justice system, people had taken matters into their own hands. He was still burning when we passed.
In Goma, I saw this kind of violence more than once. On three separate occasions, I witnessed people being burned alive in public. The trauma wasn’t hidden — it shaped how people moved, how they spoke, how they broke. The country’s Human Development Index remains among the lowest in the world, and yet the earth here is among the richest anywhere, dense with every critical resource demanded by the modern world.
Everyone blamed someone else. But no name came up more than Rwanda’s.
Foreign fingerprints are everywhere. Rwanda, in particular, casts a long shadow. As Daniel Levine-Spound of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic put it in an interview with New Lines, “There is overwhelming evidence that Rwanda is supporting, and fighting alongside, M23.”
Rwanda has consistently denied involvement. Kigali argues it is being scapegoated for the collapse of Congolese state authority in the east. Still, it enjoys a degree of protection within the international community. Rwanda is one of the largest contributors to U.N. peacekeeping missions across Africa.
As Levine-Spound notes, “The irony of Rwanda, one of the largest troop and police contributors to U.N. peacekeeping missions, triggering an armed conflict in which high numbers of peacekeepers have been killed is hard to miss.”
Jonathan R. Beloff of King’s College London sees it differently. In an interview with New Lines, he argued that much of the evidence linking Rwanda to M23 is circumstantial and questioned whether Rwanda’s interest in supporting M23 outweighed the risk of sanctions and foreign aid cuts. “Gaining access to illegal minerals,” he said, “is not enough to balance out the loss of foreign aid and international condemnation.”
In this war, the same questions can yield completely different answers — each one presented as truth. Amid the rapid change in Goma, I set out to see the human cost for myself, visiting several camps for the displaced.
Bulengo Internally Displaced Persons Camp sits 9 miles west of Goma, built on inhospitable volcanic rock and surrounded by rolling green hills. Officially, it held 40,000 people. The real number was closer to 100,000.
A week earlier, the camp had absorbed a wave of displaced people from the town of Sake, about 30 minutes west of Bulengo, after it came under heavy shelling as M23 rebels advanced. Many aid groups had already pulled out. I’d seen their white SUVs retreating into Rwanda.
Some refugees whispered fearfully of M23 night raids, hunting for Wazalendo fighters — the loose coalition of local militias backed by the Congolese army. Others praised M23’s order.
Two days after our visit, rumors spread that M23 had given residents 72 hours to leave. Had this happened while I was there? I wondered, slightly horrified.
“See? The refugees can finally go home. Stability is returning,” said Jean-Michel, an M23 political adviser who had accompanied us that day.
When I asked Betrand Bisimwa about the rumors that M23 had forced refugees to leave Bulengo, he dismissed them outright. “There are no displaced camps in the areas we control,” he said. “People live freely. It is the Kinshasa regime that forces people into camps.”
His version stood in stark contrast to that of the Congolese government. Both sides were offering entirely different accounts of what had happened at Bulengo.
Congo’s Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani condemned the expulsions as forced repatriations.
In this war, facts are slippery — twisted by WhatsApp forwards and official
statements alike. Reality has become contested ground.
Leaving Goma behind, I travelled with the M23 escort into the savannas beneath the Virunga Mountains, then climbed into the mountains themselves, into the terrain where M23 was born. We were heading for Rutshuru.
We passed the Mount Nyiragongo volcano, dormant now but still brooding after its 2021 eruption. The cone loomed above the jungle like a sleeping god. In the center of Nyiragongo town, a rusted Howitzer antiaircraft gun had been repurposed as a communal bench — a quiet monument to the permanence of war in Congo.
We reached Rutshuru in the afternoon. M23 fighters patrolled the streets in loose formations. At the compound, rifles leaned against the wall. Beers were passed around.
Over a plate of ugali, a maize dish common across Central and East Africa, Samuel, one of Kanyuka’s advisers, launched into M23’s ideology. “We are the fourth generation of a struggle,” he said. “Four generations of Tutsis being told to go home, told we are not welcome in the countries of our birth.”
He traced the movement’s four generations. First, the Rwandan Patriotic Front — born in exile, fighting for the return of Tutsi refugees in Rwanda. Second, the Congolese Tutsis who survived the Hutu militias that flooded into eastern Congo after the genocide. Third, the original M23 rebellion, triggered by the Congolese government’s failure to reintegrate former rebels into the national army. Now, Samuel said, they were the fourth: fighting not just for Tutsis, but for all Congolese communities abandoned by a state that could not, or would not, protect them.
For Samuel, the logic was simple: “The Congolese government cannot guarantee anyone’s safety. So, we are.”
Later that night, Kanyuka returned to the compound with his soldiers. “They need us back in Goma,” he said.
Driving back in daylight was risky. At night, it bordered on madness. None of this territory was truly secure. M23 held ground, but Congolese soldiers and fighters from the FDLR still roamed after dark, using the cover of night to ambush M23 convoys.
We piled into the Land Cruiser. This time, there were even more weapons. Magazines and rifles crowded the floor beneath our feet.
“If it kicks off, grab a gun and survive,” said a soldier.
The silence in the car was heavy. The towns that had felt so full of life in daylight were now deathly still. No one dared be outside.
The tension broke only when we reached the outskirts of Goma and pulled over to relieve ourselves behind the wall of a U.N. base.
One morning I woke early, just to see Goma while it was still sleeping.
“Brother, come. Look inside,” a small boy called. Inside a half-built, half-destroyed compound — it was hard to tell which — lay a fresh corpse in the dirt. It was male, maybe late 20s, eyes still open. “We pulled him from the lake this morning,” the boy said, as casually as if he were describing a fish.
People were disappearing.
On X and in WhatsApp groups, Goma was flooded with anti-M23 and anti-Tutsi rhetoric. On the ground, M23 moved quickly to silence dissent.
Over beers, a local Congolese journalist confided, “We’ll never fully accept M23 as Congolese.” He lowered his voice. “We also know not to criticize them publicly. People are disappearing. Still, there’s tentative hope they might bring long-term stability.”
Before the rebels arrived, he explained, the Congolese army had ruled through fear — arming gangs, setting up illegal roadblocks, demanding payment to cross neighborhoods. The state hadn’t paid the army in months.
I sat in my room overlooking Lake Kivu: still, endless, a surface that concealed everything
beneath.
Samuel’s idea of “four generations of struggle” lingered. M23 and the AFC framed themselves as guardians and saviors — a rebellion born from trauma and state failure. It was a seductive narrative.
When I broached the topic of human rights abuses with Samuel or other M23 members, their responses consistently deflected attention. Samuel asserted that “the Tshisekedi regime has chosen to accuse us of perpetrating the same acts, to justify its policy of ethnic cleansing.” He also criticized human rights organizations, claiming that “European agencies uncritically echo Kinshasa’s narrative.” There was never a moment for nuance or real reflection.
What haunted me wasn’t the propaganda, but the fragments of truth in every version.
The Congolese state was nonexistent in the east, and its army had aligned with abusive militias. M23 had filled the vacuum. Rwanda was backing them. The Banyamulenge were persecuted. The U.N. had failed, again.
At every step, Congolese citizens had been failed, by state, militia and international institutions alike.
I left Goma with more questions than answers.
This never-ending war was a mirror, held up to a region forever trapped between ethnicities and colonial borders.
As I crossed back into Rwanda, my shoes coated in Goma’s black volcanic mud, I realized something that should have been obvious from the beginning: The fog of war does not lift when you leave, it follows you.
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